The chapel stood at the Hold’s north-eastern corner, where the old wall bent round to meet the chalk, and its tower was the highest thing in Ormhold after the gate-head. Idrin had climbed it twice. Both times he had found the stair narrow and the air thin and the bell-frame above him dark with the shadows of the beams, and both times he had gone up no further than the ringing-loft, where the rope hung down through a hole in the boards like a long dead vine, and then he had come down again, because the frame was not his to look at.
It was Harrow who decided it was time.
“The bell has been in the frame since the first winter,” Harrow said, at the Chamber’s sitting on the morning after the silver. He said it without looking up from the minutes he was not writing. “I have counted its beams. There are six. The bell hangs from the middle one, on an iron pin, and the pin has rust on it, and the rust has been counting for two hundred years. It should be rung. A bell that is not rung is a stone with a voice it does not use.”
“Who will ring it?” asked Idrin.
“Nobody has been asked,” said Harrow, “and so nobody will ring it until somebody is.”
Gaunt, who had been listening from the bench with his arms folded, said, “The bell is a bad idea.”
“Then you will help me lower it,” said Harrow, “and I will count while you object.”
So they took the bell down, in the afternoon of the autumn’s seventh week, with a block and tackle from the Hold’s old timber store and two ropes a man’s arm thick, and Idrin went up the tower to watch. He went up slowly, because the stair was narrow and his legs were tired, and he came out into the ringing-loft with his breath short and his scarred hand on the cold rail, and looked up.
The frame was a cage of black oak. It went up into the dark of the tower’s roof in six tiers of beams, each one bolted to the next with iron. The bell hung in the middle of it, on its pin, in a cradle of wood that had gone grey with age. It was a plain bell. Its shape was simple: a broad curved lip, narrow shoulders, a plain waist with no decoration at all. Its metal had gone dull and brown with rust, and in the places where the rust had flaked away it showed a dark grey like the belly of a fish.
Gaunt had gone up the frame on a ladder of rope. He hung from the middle beam with one hand and his feet braced against the cradle, objecting to every bolt, and then, when the last bolt had been loosened, he gave a great shout and the bell came free.
It swung out. It swung very slowly, on the tackle, over the drop of the tower’s well. For a long moment it hung there in the air, dull and heavy, turning gently on its rope, and the light from the loft window fell across its lip and made the rust glitter. Idrin, holding the rail, found that he had stopped breathing.
Then Pim climbed the frame.
He went up it the way he went up everything, quickly and without thinking, with his bare feet finding the beams as though they had been put there for him. Nobody had told him to. Nobody had asked. He reached the cradle as the bell came level with the loft’s edge, and he hung from the rim of its lip with one arm and reached out with the other, and he wiped the bell’s rim with the sleeve of his shirt.
It was a long wipe. He did it slowly, as though the metal were a child’s face and he did not want to hurt it. Rust came away in a brown cloud, and then in a dull orange smear, and then in a fine dust that drifted down through the light and settled on the loft’s boards. Beneath it the bell’s lip showed a band of bright, dark metal, smooth and cold, the colour of a wet slate.
“There,” said Pim, from the frame. “Ring it. It wants to be rung. It has been waiting.”
Harrow, down in the ringing-loft below the frame, said nothing. He stood with his hands on the rope and his cap pushed back on his head, and his lips were moving. Idrin could hear him counting, very softly: one, two, three.
They lowered the bell back into its cradle. Gaunt bolted it. The rope was rigged. And then Harrow took the bell-rope in his two hands, and looked up at the dark of the tower, and set his feet, and pulled.
The first note went out over the marsh.
It was not loud, at first. It rose out of the bell’s throat like a breath, deep and low, and then it grew, and filled the tower’s well and the ringing-loft and the stair below, and then it was out through the louvres of the tower and over the wall and the chalk and the Hold’s north side, and it went down over the reeds toward the Sallow in a long, warm, humming wave. Idrin felt it in his chest. He felt it in the rail under his hand, and in the boards under his boots, and in the scar on his left hand, which tingled for a moment and then went still.
Below in the court, the Hands had stopped what they were doing.
He could see them from the tower’s window. Korrin had turned from the wall and stood with his face lifted and his bow forgotten on his back. Pell had come out of the Kitchen with a spoon in her hand and was staring up. Gaunt had gone very still on the frame. Tamsin, at the goat-pen gate, had put her arms round the nearest goat and was looking up too, with her lips parted. Sella stood on the stair with her ledger closed against her chest. Ysra, at the gate, had her back to the wall and was counting the notes as they came, and Idrin could see her face go slack with a strange, wondering concentration. Harrow had not let go of the rope.
The note reached the marsh. It went out over the reeds and the channels and the dark patches of open water, and the marsh took it. Idrin heard the echo come back. It came up off the water, and it was a half-breath late, as a voice comes back across a valley. And it was not a single echo. It was two.
The second came from under the first, as if it had been struck from somewhere deep in the stone of the causeway, or the mud, or the old roots of some drowned willow. It was one tone lower than the bell. Idrin heard it quite clearly. It was the note of a bell that was under the marsh, and had been there for a very long time, and had been waiting, patiently, for someone on the Hold’s side of the water to ring its brother.
“It has answered,” said Harrow, very quietly.
“It has answered,” said Pim, from the frame, delighted.
“It is the sound of a fort being counted,” said Korrin, from the court below. He said it loudly, to nobody, in the flat voice he used for things she did not like and could not argue with.
“It sounds like a goat that has been waiting a long time to be asked a question,” said Tamsin, and she kept her eyes on the goat she was holding.
“It sounds like dinner,” said Pell, and went back into the Kitchen, but Idrin saw her hands tremble on the spoon as she went.
The bell rang out three more times, slowly, and the echoes came back each time, the lower one under the higher. Then Harrow let the rope go and stood back, and the bell swung on its cradle, and slowly the note faded away over the marsh, and the silence came back to the Hold like a tide.
Idrin came down from the tower with his legs unsteady. He stood in the court beside Gaunt, who had come down the ladder and was wiping his hands on his apron, and he tried to say what he had felt, and could not find the Royal Forms for it, and did not want them.
“It was cast from the same metal,” he said at last. “I think. I dreamed of a bell when I was a boy. In Lessary, in the summer house above the sea. It hung in a tower in the Lessary court, on the hill, and it rang every evening at the same hour, and I was not allowed to go up. The sound of it came down to the terrace where I sat with my tutor. I have always thought it was the most beautiful sound in the world.” He stopped. “I do not know whether this is the same bell. I think it may be. I cannot tell.”
“Nobody can tell,” said Gaunt. He did not object. He put his palm flat against the bell’s iron, which had been lowered at last to rest on a stone blocking in the court, and he held it there, with his eyes closed. “It is cold,” he said. “It is rough. It is the roughest iron I have ever touched. And then—”
He stopped. His palm had begun, very faintly, to warm. Idrin saw the heat come up through the metal, and saw Gaunt’s breath catch, and saw the whole frame of the bell, from its cradle to its beams, shiver once in the evening air, the way a stove shivers when someone has lit it in another room of the house.
Gaunt took his hand away quickly and looked at his palm. It was red and whole.
“That was not me,” he said.
“No,” said Harrow. He had come down from the ringing-loft with his cap in his hand, and he set the cap back on his head and looked up at the tower, counting the louvres. “It was the stone. The bell-marked stone from the north wall. It has been ringing since the summer, very faint, under the courses, like a barrel struck from inside. I have been listening to it every morning. This evening it answered.”
He turned, and walked to the corner of the court where the stone lay in the shadow of the chapel wall, with its bell-shaped mark turned up to the sky. He put his palm on it, very gently, as Gaunt had put his on the iron.
The stone hummed under his hand. It was a low, faint sound, just audible in the dusk. And beneath it, from far off, from under the marsh and the reeds and the drowned roots of the willows, the second bell answered again, one tone lower, and then was still.